In the conventional planning and deployment process of a network, lots of network devices need to be configured manually one by one before entering a network, and the following version upgrade process of the network device is completed through manual configuration too; therefore, a large amount of labor force is consumed during the configuration process; in addition, since the deployment process of the network is complex, it is easy to make a mistake during the manual configuration. Thus, an upgrade method which is easy to implement and provides an accurate configuration is needed in the deployment process of a network.
At present, a method for automatically upgrading a network device has been is proposed to achieve the purpose of accurate configuration, for example, a network management server completes, through a dedicated channel established between each network device and a switch, an upgrade operation of a corresponding network device, namely, before the upgrade, the network device first establishes with the switch the dedicated channel used for the following upgrade of the network device, then the network management server implements the upgrade management of the network device through the dedicated channel. Although this automatic upgrade method can avoid the operation of manual configuration and improve the efficiency of upgrade, it is needed to rely on a third party, that is, the switch, to complete the upgrade operation of a network device; therefore, when a network management server performs the upgrade management of a network device, it is needed to complete an extra configuration of a third party, thus the cost is relatively high and the implementation process is tedious.